English grammar for teaching - Trường Đại học Công nghiệp Thực phẩm Tp. Hồ Chí Minh

evaluating whether they have understood the meaning of the language item well or not, perhaps not confirming a student answer until you have heard from a number of them. While asking i[r]

10 Much, many, a lot of, lots of, plenty of, a great deal of 57

16 Comparisons: as as, not as as, the same as, like 76

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51 Requests, orders, offers, permission: can, could, will, would, may, might 211

53 Obligation and compulsion: must, have to, should, ought 218

54 Possibility and certainty: may, might, could, must, must have, can’t,

About the series

M a cm illa n B ook s for T each ers

Welcome to Macmillan Books for Teachers T he titles are written by acknowledged and innovative leaders in each field to help you develop your teaching repertoire, practical skill and theoretical knowledge

Suited to both newer and to more experienced teachers, the series combines the best of classic teaching methodology with recent, cutting-edge developments Insights from academic research are combined with hands-on experience to create books with focus on real-world teaching solutions

We hope you will find the ideas in them a source of inspiration in your own teaching and enjoyment in your professional learning

Adrian Underhill

T itles in th e se r ie s

500 Activities for the Primary Classroom

Carol Read

700 Classroom Activities

David Seymour & Maria Popova

A n A - Z o fE L T

Scott T hornbury

Blended Learning

Pete Sharma & Barney Barrett

Beyond the Sentence

Scott T hornbury

Children Learning English

Jayne M oon

Discover English

Rod Bolitho & Brian Tomlinson

Learning Teaching

Jim Scrivener

Sound Foundations

Adrian Underhill

Teaching Practice

Roger Gower, Diane Phillips &

Steve Walters

Teaching Reading Skills

Christine N uttall

Uncovering CLIL

Peeter Mehisto, David M arsh &

M aria Jesus Frigols

Uncovering E A P

Sam M cC arter & Phil Jakes

Uncovering Grammar

Scott T hornbury

About the author

Jim Scrivener has worked in many different countries, including two years in Kenya, three in the USSR and seven in Hungary He has been Head of Teacher Training for International House Hastings, Director of Education for IH

Budapest and is currently Head of Teacher Development for Bell International, where he designed the Online Delta course He was leader of the team that designed the Euro exams and has been actively involved with Cambridge ESOL exams including design of their online teacher portfolio He is married to Noemi and has two adult sons, Alex and Ben, and a young daughter, Maisie He can be very boring about Bob Dylan if you give him half a chance

Teachers frequently need to present new grammar to learners and grammar presentations are often at the heart of language lessons This is part of the current general ‘communicative’ methodology, and is embodied or assumed in most current materials Coursebooks usually provide ‘ready-made’ presentations, but teachers often want to strengthen or supplement the grammatical explanations in order to meet the particular learning events in their own classrooms And when other materials like a reading text or an online activity are being used, there can be multiple situations

in which further elucidation of a grammatical structure may be required When this occurs a teacher has to decide w7hether it is appropriate to deal with this and if so howT

to insert it elegantly into ongoing work, and whether to do it now or later

This places a constant demand on teachers to identify quickly:

1) the new7 structure and its possible forms 2) the meanings imparted by the structures in context 3) the core of what the student needs to learn

4) and then, crucially, ways to present and practise the structure and to check that the core concepts are understood

Teaching English Grammar aims to help teachers meet these demands by offering

quick access to key aspects of structures, ready-to-use presentation ideas, contexts for first and subsequent exposure to new language and insights on checking understanding

Teachers with less experience often struggle with providing contexts for the new language they are presenting, and the activities here aim to provide simple and effective situational contexts for such language at this point in the lesson This is important, because if the situation is chosen so that the human meanings conveyed within it are compelling and transparent, then the meaning of the grammatical point can almost ‘teach itself’, reducing the need for verbal re-explanation from the teacher, and allowing the teacher to attend to the practice of the forms of the structure

At this point the teacher faces a second challenge: incisive checking of learners’ understanding of the language point T he agile selection and use of concept questions to do this is also a crucial and often elusive skill for a new teacher to develop, the lack of which easily leads instead to a habitualised over-reliance on the misleading question ‘Do you understand?’The illustrative concept questions

in this book aim to help teachers to develop their confidence and facility in using these to check understanding

More experienced teachers will be able to use the material here to review7 and overhaul the texture and elegance of their repertoire of presentation activities and approaches, streamlining their approach and developing their confidence and effectiveness

Adrian Underhill

Series Editor

This book gathers together practical teaching ideas and key information about language in order to help you prepare and teach grammar lessons I hope that it will save you time, energy and stress and help you to feel more confident, well- informed and one step ahead of the students M odern coursebooks are generally excellent but sometimes we (and our students) feel the need to step away from their texts and exercises Rather than using coursebook material to introduce a new grammar point, you may want to do a ‘books closed’ presentation on the board - or add in an extra practice activity You will find lots of ideas here to help you present and practise grammar points

Presentation The Presentation ideas in this book usually involve the teacher upfront, introducing and modelling language items, possibly using the board They are particularly suitable for working with language items your class has not met or studied before Many of them involve creating a context or situation which will help to exemplify the meaning and use of the target items

Practice The Practice ideas are based around students using the language themselves These sections list a range of possible ideas you could use to practise various features of meaning and form They are not intended as a sequence of activities

to be used in a single lesson Select the idea most relevant for your lesson and your class

It’s worth noting that this division into presentation and practice is somewhat arbitrary Many teachers prefer to introduce newr items through activities that involve lots of student language use and less teacher modelling or explanation Depending on your own teaching approach, you may find that you prefer to use ideas from the practice sections to introduce new language

All the teaching ideas are given as quite brief notes There are many steps that I

do not mention and I have to assume that you will fill in missing details yourself - and in doing so you can start to make the ideas your own and more relevant for your class For example, to avoid repetition I have not usually stated that you need to use concept questions in presentations or that it’s im portant to focus

on form - but please assume that both of these steps are usually necessary The Presentation sections mainly describe situations or contexts to help you present the meaning and use of the language However, you will invariably also need to focus on the way that the item is structured, even if that is not explicitly stated You may find that some ideas seem unsuitable for your class as they stand - but

I hope that they can still inspire you to think of other related activities that are suitable

Some key notions in presentation and practice

Contexts

Many of the presentations in this book make use of a context These are simple, easy-to-convey situations, scenes or stories that will help to clarify the meaning

or use of a language item You can create the context by drawing pictures on the board, holding up flashcards of photos or sketches or by creating a mini-situation

in class using students to act out simple roles following your instructions A really good context will seem to lead inevitably to natural use of the target language Typically, after creating a context, you might elicit language from the students to see if they already have any idea about the target language If they don’t, it allows you to model the new language yourself

Eliciting

You elicit by giving cues (asking a question, miming, showing a picture, giving a keyword, etc) that encourage the students to say something themselves - perhaps

in order to draw out their ideas or to see what they know of the target language you are wTorking on This may help to involve students in a lesson, as they will be doing more than simply listening to you speaking They can also show7 wrhat they already know7 and this can help you to adjust the level of the work Eliciting can help to reduce the amount of unnecessary teacher talk in class

Modelling

You model by saying something aloud once or a number of times because you want the class to hear a well-pronounced example of a language item You should take care to speak as naturally as possible and not artificially exaggerate any features

Drilling

You drill by modelling a sentence (perhaps to exemplify a specific grammatical

item) then getting the students to repeat - often chorally (ie as a whole class)

Alternatively, you could also ask different individuals to repeat - or pairs to say the sentence(s) to each other Drilling is a very restricted use of language to help students notice, focus on and improve things like verb endings, word order, pronunciation etc If a student repeats incorrectly during a drill it is usually helpful to correct D on’t worry too much about drilling being an unrealistic

or £non-communicative’ use of language - or that the students might be rather unnaturally over-using target items This type of controlled manipulation of language items is very useful

Story / Dialogue building

You can build a short story or dialogue that includes examples of language you want the students to learn Use the board or pictures to introduce the context and characters and then model (or elicit) lines of the story / dialogue, one by one - which the students can repeat As the story / dialogue gets longer, students can recap and practise saying the whole thing

Pair work

Students do pair work when each student in class works with one partner Often the students in each pair are referred to as A and B Pair work allows lots of students to speak and work simultaneously, maximising interaction time in class

Mingling

In a mingling activity, each student in class stands up and walks around the room, meeting and talking to a number of other people - and perhaps after completing

a task, moving on to meet others

Engagement

Although teachers often worry about whether their lesson is £fun? or not,

perhaps a more im portant consideration is whether it is engaging Students will

learn little or nothing if they do not find the work interesting and involving

It needs to attract them , fill their minds and hold their attention This may be because the topic is relevant, the task is stimulating, the end result appeals to them - or for many other reasons One key factor to bear in m ind is to pitch the level of challenge appropriately - neither too high nor too low - and of course this level will vary for different people in your class and at different times

Creating the right challenge level may, for example, involve the teacher varying the difficulty of questions as they ask different people around the class

What are timelines - and how can I use them?

Timelines are a simple visual aid that you (or a student) can quickly draw on the board They make the flow of time visible - as a line moving from the left (past) through ‘now’ towards the right (the future) By adding other things to the line (eg an ‘X ’ to indicate an event or a stick baby to show when someone was born) we can clarify when something happened and this can help learners to understand the uses of a tense or how one tense is different from another

Timelines are valuable both as (a) a teaching tool to introduce the meaning and use of verb tenses and (b) as a checking tool (like concept questions) to find out how much learners have understood

Use timelines as an aid when explaining the meaning and use of a tense Ask concept questions based on the timelines Try using incomplete timelines as

a way of eliciting ideas from students ( When do you think it happened?) Invite

students to come to the board to draw their suggested timelines - and let other students agree or disagree - and make alternative suggestions Draw wrong timelines and invite students to correct you Timelines are a great way

of clarifying and checking meaning But just rem ember that their meaning may not be immediately transparent to everyone - and there may be different interpretations Many students seem to find timelines very helpful but others may remain puzzled

Example sentences Where possible and appropriate, example sentences in the main text are real samples of language in use, taken from the Macmillan English Dictionary corpus M ost are exactly as listed in the corpus, but in some cases, they have been edited slightly in order to help focus on the language point being exemplified by removing or changing words that seem potentially confusing or distracting for the levels in which the lessons are likely to be taught Even so, you may find some of the samples unusual - and may consider them unsuitable

for their classes For example, the present perfect examples include Someone has

just waltzed off with my drink This certainly isn’t the sort of example students

typically come across - but, after just a little explanation of what a waltz is -

and of the colloquial use meaning ‘steal’ - this is actually a very striking and visual example - and the sort of chunk of language that students tend to love learning by heart (which is halfway to getting to grips with the language) Of course, if you are not personally familiar with the meaning of an idiomatic use, then it’s sensible to avoid it - but, if you do know it, I encourage you to think about using real sentences like this as they stand (even if you do need to teach the meaning of a new verb or two) - not least because some of the odder or unexpected pictures they conjure up might be more memorable

Feedback and correction

In order to get better at grammar, students need more than input and practice They also need to get lots of feedback on how well they are doing

Encouragement is important, of course, but it’s also vital to give clear, truthful information about how well they use language If a learner is constantly making

a mistake (or could say things better than they are doing), it’s little help if the teacher keeps saying only ‘Good,’ ‘Well done,’ ‘Perfect’ and so on

We can distinguish some important ways of responding to errors

1) Simply indicating that an error has been made (eg by raising your eyebrows or shaking your head) without correcting - in the hope of the learner - or a peer - being able to correct it themselves The thinking processes involved in such self / peer correction may help long-term learning

2) Indicating w7hat the mistake is - or wThere it is (eg by repeating an incorrect word with questioning intonation) without correcting (again, to encourage students to think and correct themselves)

3) Giving the correction, partly or wholly yourself (eg by saying a corrected verb form) and getting the learner to complete it or repeat it

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